


i'll wither, so peel away the bark

by esbis



Series: out of time and out of place [2]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (is that a proper tag), Angst, Future Fic, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, cybernetic enhancements, this was heavier than the lance fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-02
Updated: 2016-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-28 14:35:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8450137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/esbis/pseuds/esbis
Summary: They let their hair grow long again, leaves it down like thick and tangled vines grown wild. A lion's mane. The druid's marks that bloom between their shoulder blades like the red flower are not for anyone's eyes. The other scars lace down their legs, creeping tendrils of pale pink ivy. They were, after all, the guardian of the forest once.They learn that their body is like a forest. Forests are another thing entirely, forests are wild and full of life, humming with birdsong and bloodlust. Forests thrive come rain or fire or man, roots curled deep into the sweet red earth; the woods refuse to fall at the hands of anyone.Burnt down, cut down, trampled on, torn apart. They thrive.





	

i.

Something about don't look straight at the sun or your corneas will burn up. Don't look straight at an eclipse because it'll burn even worse. Dad looks very serious about this.

Okay, Katie says, eyes burning with a hungry curiosity to look, to gravitate towards the white-hot ring suspended in the violet sky past the tinted surface of the eclipse glasses. Okay, she says, clinging on to the glasses as if she fears having nothing to hold on to.

 

ii.

Everything is burning, raw, scorching searing through frayed nerves and frothing skin; the screams ripping through their throat like a thousand claws that draw forth blood. Blood flows down in rivulets alongside tears of agony from empty sockets, red and cracked. Pidge's knees have given out long ago, their nails have chipped as they raked across sharp grooves in the metal floor, have raised irritated lines of red wherever they draw over skin.

Their body lurches, heaves, feeling reduced to nothing but sheer pain that sets their lungs ablaze as a million hot marbles roil inside their head. Blood and metal. It's so dark. The druid is laughing, thin and reedy, tucking unseeing eyes into her robes. Blood and metal. Sheer, unadulterated hatred.

Far away, the muffled voices burst into sudden clarity, heralded by the loud bang of metal as the doors must have been burst open. There is screaming beyond Pidge's own, gusts of fury that tail behind the sudden whirlwind of arcing blades and canon blasts, both moving in a cyclone as the hag disappears, reappears, disappears in foul-smelling smoke. 

The druid appears a last time, purely out of spite, to hold out dripping eyes in between gnarled indigo hands. Hunk lunges, right into the suffocating smoke. In someone's arms, Pidge covers their ears as they hear the scream of frustration, the horrific bang of fists against metal walls than makes the entire room shudder. Horrible names spat out in a voice that sounded foreign to such hatred. 

Lance's hand carding through the matted ends of their hair, cold through the gloves. Knees tucked into their side. Somewhere, Green is keening in distress, core aching for her blinded paladin.

Sobbing. Colors bleeding. Wetness keeps spilling and they aren't sure what it is.

 

iii.

"You mean an entire week."

"Yes."

"In the woods, living like primitives, without any real technology."

"Primitives is a little too harsh for a camping trip, try 'typical white family instead'?" Matt snickers, throwing a few plain shirts onto their bed. "Besides, it's not like we've been away from civilization for long periods of time before."

Pidge rolls their eyes, trying not to remember days stranded on a pale violet desert with a beat-up Lion half-buried on its crash landing site. The fine glass seeps between the grooves of armor and the moonlight sets the dunes ablaze in lilac flames. But it's not like that anymore. There are phones to use for emergencies and supplies more than enough for them all. It's not like that anymore

(they sleep with a knife under their sleeping bed, a coiled spring ready to jump at the slightest sound of danger among the unnerving, unending cricket song, even if it wasn't like that anymore) 

 

iv.

On Earth everyone assumed it's contacts. Eyes can't be that brilliant. Pidge smiles, arranges their mouth into a curve that will never reach their eyes, real or not real, and goes along with it. No one usually asks further than that.

Matt knew immediately. It's been months, and yet each of the few times he's tried to ask, they say they aren't comfortable. So he shrinks back into his seat, curls his scarred fingers into the fading warmth of the coffee cups, and watches them gleam under the fluorescent lights. It still brings back the operating room in a maze-like hospital on Celeve, with the soft blue lights and the sounds that seemed to float through air like water. He had watched them replace his sibling's eyes with the ones Coran had traded for, had stayed by the healing pods for days on end as the skin around their sockets began to heal slowly.

They had gone to Celeve twice. The first, a few cycles after that ambush on the Galran cruiser, for the eyes Coran had gotten. Cybernetic eyes of the latest model, capable of infrared and night vision, zoom, camera lenses, and enhanced clarity, among other things. 

Pidge had thanked them over and over again, of course. The upgrades made operations so much easier and faster, leaving behind trails of fallen warships and organizations in the eyes' wake.

It was weeks before Matt found himself on the floor of Pidge's room, arms wrapped around the blankets around them as they cried with eyes that could never shed tears, nails clacking against crystalline retinas and calloused fingers dragging down still-healing skin. 

Crying without tears felt like pulling at the edges of a gaping hole; the ache is crushing, the ache is consuming. There is no reprieve in heaving shoulders and dry sobs, and it's only a little less like sticking your feet into the place where the shore greets the sea to find the land dry when the water recedes. Hot and prickly, urchin spines all over.

The second time they returned to Celeve was three years later, just before they left for Earth. These were normal eyes, just some other creature's flesh and maybe a little bit of alien magic, no fancy features. Bark-brown and amber, the colors close enough. Grateful as they were, Pidge didn't want anything to do with the cybernetic eyes anymore.

Those belonged to a life they were about to leave behind. There was no point in keeping them.

 

v.

Pidge hates the dark. It reminds them of losing their sight, of those endless periods of time being able to do nothing but grasp at disembodied sounds and fleeting shards of sensation. It reminds them of floating into space in a broken pod, encased in claustrophobic darkness. 

Pidge still wakes up screaming to nightmares -- wet black blood under their knees, dying comrades and rebel ships tearing flaming paths across the emptiness of space, eyes fizzling out of their sockets and the pain of it burning through lungs and throat, also.

Matt comes, always, and half the time he's awake and aware and ready to comfort her with open arms and gentle eyes but half the time he stumbles in awake and panicked and ready to fight as if he was still on that Galra ship, and it's nights like those that throw the entire Holt family into chaos -- Dad wakes up screaming for them too, still not forgetting, still ambling over prosthetic legs and aching joints, and Mom weeps all the tears for her broken, broken family that Katie cannot.

Mom sticks the fluorescent stars back into the faint outlines they've left into the ceiling decades ago. Matt hangs strings of lights over the window and through the slats in the bed's headboard. Hunk gives them a nightlight, a small disc with the Altean symbol of their initial glowing soft yellow.

That way they never wake up to the dark again. At least.

At least.

 

vi.

They let their hair grow long again, leaves it down like thick and tangled vines grown wild. A lion's mane. They never wear anything without sleeves, the druid's marks that bloom between their shoulder blades like the red flower are not for anyone's eyes. The other scars lace down their legs, creeping tendrils of pale pink ivy. They were, after all, the guardian of the forest once.

They learn that their body is like a forest. Temples are revered, temples are burnt down and desecrated and crumbled apart into chalky remnants of forgotten belief and limestone. Forests are another thing entirely, forests are wild and full of life, humming with birdsong and bloodlust. Forests thrive come rain or fire or man, roots curled deep into the sweet red earth; the woods refuse to fall at the hands of anyone.

Burnt down, cut down, trampled on, torn apart. They thrive.

 

vii.

"I'm going to reach all those stars someday."

She is six when she promises she will be able to do something as great as her father did. He is warm and steady by her side, telling her of course she would. She guides his hands -- strong and calloused, years of connecting the invisible lines between the constellations and setting up telescopes and models for his children -- to all the brighter stars, "I'm going to see that one, and that one, and that one, and that..."

 

"I can't even see Earth from here."

They are fourteen when they sit on the edge of a broken white bridge, legs dangling over the precipice. The Arusians are blessed with a crystalline atmosphere, a dome encasing them from the million glittering blue-hot stars and planets, and yet, Earth is not one of them. Hunk sighs and wraps his arm around them. They refuse to cry.

 

viii.

" _There's not a star in heaven we can't_ \--"

"--haven't!--"

" _\--reached!_ " Lance hops down the counter, eyes and grin bright as he sings to the old movie playing in the background. Pidge scrambles out of his grasp, laughing, shoving Keith into his arms instead and doubles over as Lance spins and dips the protesting boy.

The living room smells of popcorn and stir-fry and the rest of the unusual mix of food arrayed over the low wooden table before the television. Hunk's dog leaps over to Lance's abandoned spot on the sofa, plopping down into the nest of throw pillows even as the boy hollers out his protest from the hallway.

Pidge grins, warm beneath the blankets, heart swelling with happiness. It was good to have all of them together for a while, for a few days in this little house. All of them broken, a few parts -- fingers, eyes, a leg, among other things -- twisted up and traded and trailing somewhere out in the vast universe, but it was okay. They had each other. It was healing.

(later on, the dog stretches out and Pidge refuses to give up their seat and they finish the movie with Keith on Lance's lap and Lance on Hunk's lap, on a heap on the smaller sofa). 

 

ix. 

Without meaning to, Pidge looks for Green underneath the thick canopies in the woods, searches for the telltale glint of metal beneath gnarled branches, the soft yellow glow of eyes through the foliage. They were never a big fan of nature before the whole thing. But now the forest reminds them too much of Green.

Then again, even technology did. Twelve years before they returned to Earth, they had been looking forward to getting a driver's license. Pidge could drive now, but didn't do it unless there was no other choice. A decade of piloting Green made maneuvering the inanimate chunks of metal on wheels a chore -- card couldn't listen. Cars sounded like squawking sirens and rattling air conditioners and on sweltering days where everything sounded like that and skin peeling off sticky vinyl, Pidge would give anything to hear Green purring in their head. Comforting and guiding and knowing. 

They find some solace in the trees. Bark flakes off like debris and vines tumble downward to reach for them; sunlight dapples the forest floor in stipples of pale, warm yellow. A cocoon from the outside world. 

Pidge drifts into sleep, lion mane and scarred limbs fading into the quiet scene. The dream sounds like softly rushing water, feels like rocking on a canoe lifetimes ago and the familiar ache of anticipation, _something big is about to happen_ , as they step off the boat and into the jungle. 

From the temple, from the deepest recesses of their mind where all sacred memories lie, Green calls.

 

  
_cover your crystal eyes;  
and feel the tones that tremble down your spine_

**Author's Note:**

> So I made a Pidge-centric sequel to that Lance future fic, heh. I wasn't actually expecting that to get over 50 kudos in like three days, aka more than I've ever gotten, and that being the first fic I had written and posted in almost was eyar was just, wow. i'm blesst thank you all sm???
> 
> I don't think I like this as much as the Lance fic, but oh well, haha. I wasn't expecting myself to give Pidge the worst loss out of them all (body parts, you know), but it happened. i'm so sorry, my child
> 
> title and lyrics at the end from Crystals by Of Monsters and Men.


End file.
